Exams

D-graded

Are competing exam boards driving down standards?

AS USUAL, the government is saying that children have done better in this year's exams than ever before. And as usual, almost nobody believes them. This year, the proportion of GCSE results graded A*-C rose by 0.5% to 57.1%. The improved marks prompted worries about whether standards are improving or exams are getting easier.

Grade inflation is rightly a cause for concern. GCSE exams, normally taken at 16, are the one qualification most school leavers have, and employers should be able to use them to compare their prospective employees. If the value of each grade is diluted over the years, then the results become a devalued currency. The latest theory to explain grade inflation is that exam boards, under pressure from schools wanting to do well in published performance tables, compete by making good results easier to come by.

Trying to work out what causes the inflation is a murky business, because different things can make grades go up. Students may get smarter, and exams may get easier. A third possibility is that the boundaries between different grades shift. When the grade boundaries go down, more students get good marks without any improvement in their work. Last week, a retiring examiner, Jeffrey Robinson, claimed that standards had been progressively lowered over the years to improve students' grades.

So how do the examiners know where to set the boundaries? “At the end of the day, you can only make that judgment when the students have sat the paper,” says Paul Sokoloff, who speaks for all the exam boards in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It would appear that examiners assess how hard a paper is by seeing how well students do in it. Mr Sokoloff admits that there is something rather circular about it. He calls the process “a complex web of check and counter-check”.

Unfortunately, this complex web appears to have broken down somewhere. Even if the exam boards are right that students are likely to get better every single year, that does not explain the dramatic rise in pass marks following the introduction of GCSEs in 1988. Nor does it explain why that rise has now slowed down (see chart).

Mr Robinson's suggestion is that as schools find some exam boards harder than others, they opt for the papers that deliver the highest grades. The boards are therefore obliged to compete with each other by lowering standards. Alan Smithers, a professor of education at Liverpool University, says schools have plenty of incentives to choose the easiest boards. “Results have become so much more important recently,” he says. He thinks that the growing importance of league tables, as well as new government targets, may mean schools will stay with a board only if they keep getting good marks.

That might explain why the rate of improvement has slowed. Over the past 15 years the number of exam boards has steadily decreased, from more than 20 to only five outside Scotland now. That has made it easier for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, a quango that tries to keep standards constant, to compare different papers. But the fact remains that the same qualifications can be reached by different means: some boards will offer more course-work, some exams will have more modules, and so on. So students will presumably find some boards' exams easier than others.

If exam boards are competing with each other to produce easier exams, surely it would be better to have just one exam board? Mr Sokoloff is wary of such a plan. “The move in all sectors of our society has been away from monopolies and towards things that offer choice,” he notes.